We Have Found the Producers and They Are Us

Soviet occupation of the United States wouldn't be very nice. Really. There wouldn't be any coffee to brighten a working man's morning. There wouldn't be an express lane at the local food distribution center. And all the pretty women would be shacked up with Russians, or worse, collaborators.

It is a reality is too dismal to contemplate. Even more dismal is that Amerika, the TV movie depicting this banal scenario, got more coverage for a time than Afghanistan, Poland, or Nicaragua. it was a perfectly packaged deal for the network: the entertainment division excreted it, the advertising division sold it, and the news division editorialized about it.

In a televised interview some years ago, Harlan Ellison, the science fiction subculture's resident television critic, said that TV turns your brain to "puree of bat guano. And the quality of the programming wasn't the only problem, as Ellison saw it. For, he said, the fault lies in the way the programming is received by the viewer.

No doubt there is much truth in Ellison's remarks. By its very nature, TV programming, and especially the series format that dominates it, is certain to have a mind-numbing effect. It provides a predigested, comfortable reality much like that provided by formula movies with their stock plot resolutions.

The difference is that while films are over in a few hours, the reality created by a network series can go оп, seemingly forever, at the same hour every night (or week) on the same channel. One doesn't have to leave home to get it; it doesn't have to be paid for directly. And, unlike even the trashiest of novels, which require the reader to use imagination and intellect to visualize and conceive what the author's words only suggest, TV is an early and primitive version of the "experience Machine" that Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick uses to illustrate various ethical issues.

Nozick's experience machine is a device that stimulates the brain to produce all--literally all--of the experiences associated with any life the user chooses. The user can be a rock and roll star, a saint, a brilliant artist, or anything else without leaving the comfort of his or her personal life support chamber. Like Nozick's machine, TV allows the viewer to experience life without leaving the comforts of home. News and educational programming produce a facsimile of learning. Entertainment programming produces a facsimile of feeling. Sports programming produces a facsimile of doing. Ads produce a facsimile purpose for one's life.

Television would be even more frightening if there were any sort of centralized control of it. People might be led to believe any weird or twisted thing whatever. But, the FCC notwithstanding, no one has been able to control much of television content, at least in this country, The emergence of cable and VCR technology has made the situation even more unmanageable from the viewpoint of the would-be censor. People have a veritable banquet of experiences from which to choose.

Unfortunately, a good many of them seem to prefer banality. It is as if someone actually marketed Nozick's experience box and millions of people chose the program for boring, humdrum lives devoid of passion, joy, endeavor, curiosity, and even uncertainty.

Television makes life unburdensome to the viewer. It trivializes everything, from the horrors of nuclear war and military occupation to the very personal matters of raising children and making a living. The sufferings of the characters in Amerika were insignificant in the face of what they had lost. They were exactly the same kinds of suffering always portrayed on TV: the kinds that are relatively comfortable and easy to bear.

I suppose one ought not to get too hysterical about this. People will always seek ways to escape the intellectual and emotional burdens of life. But American television is a challenge to those of us who want to believe that people can take control of their lives and make of them something more than mere existence. A people awash in the mindnumbing inanities of TV aren't likely to exist very long as people. The world TV creates is trivial, but the threat it poses to the vitality and subtlety of our culture is anything but.